In the 2016 Google Founder’s Letter, CEO Sundar Pichai cited Google’s long-term investment in machine learning and AI. “It’s what allows you to use your voice to search for information,” he explained, “to translate the web from one language to another, to filter the spam from your inbox, to search for ‘hugs’ in your photos and actually pull up pictures of people hugging ... to solve many of the problems we encounter in daily life. It’s what has allowed us to build products that get better over time, making them increasingly useful and helpful.”

In addition to using machine learning for its own products, Google has released several applied machine learning services -- for vision, speech, natural language and translation -- and has open-sourced its TensorFlow scalable machine learning package. An additional service based on TensorFlow, the Cloud Machine Learning Platform, is still in a closed alpha test phase. I hope to review the Cloud Machine Learning Platform and TensorFlow later this year.